Where I Write by Beth Francis

Once upon a time…

Over fifty years ago, my first short story was published in the Brownie Magazine. I’d scribbled it in a lined notebook, and typed it on a borrowed typewriter on the living room table, surrounded by my bemused and skeptical family.

Years later, married with young children, I graduated to a typewriter of my own, electric it was, I loved it, but I still wrote my stories on the living room table, surrounded by my family.

            Now I have my own computer, my own room and my own desk.

  

The characters I write about are still created wherever I happen to be: 

On buses, trains, cafés anywhere where people strike up impromptu conversations and tell amazing stories.

At the swimming pool, swimming length after length, ideal for thinking, no phone calls, no texts.

In the garden, my characters often end up working in their gardens and I’m currently writing a Pocket Novel set on an allotment.

Walking along the coast, the inspiration for Safe Harbour came when I was watching a yacht sailing into a bay.

The list is endless, but when the real work starts, getting those ideas from my head into print, I return to my desk.

The ever-changing view from the window can have me staring at the mountains instead of the computer, but to be honest, after years of writing surrounded by distractions, I’ve no excuse not to simply get on with it!

  

Except…this morning the mountains are covered with a layer of sparkling white snow, so beautiful it would be a crime not to pause for a while...

Where I Write by Juliet Greenwood

The place where I write is my crog loft.

If you don’t happen to live in a traditional quarryman’s cottage halfway up a Welsh mountain, I should explain that a crog loft is a tiny room tucked under the eves where the children would have been packed off to sleep. Fortunately mine has been extended at some point, plus I’m short, so I can just about stand up in it, and there’s a window looking over my garden with some pretty glorious sunsets over Anglesey.

Originally you’d have clambered up a ladder. I’ve now got stairs, but they are very steep and not for the faint hearted. As the rest of the cottage is all on the ground floor, it means that my little crog loft is a world into itself. I have my computer, shelves of files and a few books, and pictures and bits of research and information pinned onto the wooden cladding (necessary insulation!) of the walls. I love it. It means I can leave my work behind up there when I go back down into the living part of the house. There’s usually a cat sitting on my lap, and Phoebe the dog has her bed in one corner (when not commandeered by the cat, that is), and I work each morning to her gentle post-dog-walk snores.

The windowsill is very wide (a legacy of thick stone walls) so Phoebe also can sit there and supervise proceedings, with half an eye on the sheep in the fields around us and any goings-on in the garden next door. Plus she can watch for any visitors coming up my path and rush down to greet them through the cat flap.  

Juliet's garden

I love my little crog loft. It’s where my imagination is free to roam, and when I leave I can leave it just as it is, so my characters are there, waiting for me when I return. My thinking time is when I’m in my garden, or dog walking, but I always return to my crog loft to focus the mind and get on with the real business of the day. It is, without doubt, a room of my own.

Hinterland: Location as Character by Juliet Greenwood



Aberystwyth Pier

Watching Hinterland, the new ‘noir’ crime series following in the footsteps of The Bridge, it struck me once again how essential the sense of place is to a story. It’s something I’ve always known, of course. I’ve searched nooks and crannies for the remains of Dickensian London. I’ve sighed over Jane Austen’s Bath and Lyme Regis. I once even had breakfast amongst the swirling mist at Top Withens, near Haworth, and understood exactly where Emily Bronte was coming from in Wuthering Heights.

Aberystwyth

Like its Scandinavian cousins, Hinterland’s atmosphere, as well as the drama, is rooted in its landscape. Hinterland is filmed around Aberystwyth, on the West Wales coast. It’s a landscape that has so many resonances for me. It’s where my publisher, the wonderful Honno Press, is based, and it’s also the landscape of my childhood – a little further north, but still the same vast beaches, the wide expanses of moorland that are at once bleak and stunningly beautiful, ever changing with the light. It’s strange seeing such a familiar landscape through the lens of a camera, both familiar and transformed.

Barmouth

I’m used to seeing where I live now, in the heart of Snowdonia, on film. But those are romantic fantasies, like First Knight, which even managed to transform a nuclear power station into Camelot. Hinterland is a contemporary, sophisticated take on stories within the landscape. It’s one of tiny, close knit communities, that both pull together and where old hatreds run deep. It’s the shifting mix of people, moving between the urban and the rural, like the natural flow of language between English and Welsh. And its stories link the old and the new, from ancient myths to very modern tales of abuse, obsession, jealousy and murder.

Mist in the Valleys

Even the rain and the late autumn colours give the brooding atmosphere of the ‘hinterland’ that lies beyond the surface of the people and communities where the crimes are committed, and the past, as yet only hinted at, of the main characters.

Seeing a familiar landscape transformed into a power character in a drama has made me think again about the way settings are so vital to a story. And I’m glad that Hinterland has proved such a success, and has now been sold to Germany, America and Canada. The DVDs are out, and a second series has been commissioned. I can’t wait!

Goldmine

Like most writers, I’ve been told over and over again that ‘Wales doesn’t sell’. The village where I live is one you would pass through without a second glance on the way to the mountains. Its high street is shabby and rundown, with nothing to attract the visitors. But step away from that first impression and here, too, is a hinterland of a strong community that is both very traditional, and also accepting of those who have chosen to make their lives here from all over the world. There are seething feuds and resentments. Outrageous characters. Life in an intensively-lived microcosm of humanity, within a landscape that is both wild, and scared by industry that, in the Stone and Bronze ages, once made this coastline an industrial powerhouse and vital centre of trade, whose artefacts are found all over Europe.

I’m taking notes …

Read more: Hinterland to be seen in Germany